Geoff Russ: Conservatives must cull of the bureaucracy to save Canada from progressive rot

Pierre Poilievre and Conservatives lead the Liberals in a new Abacus poll, fueled by growing concerns over affordability, cost of living and economic pressures. Photo by Jason Franson/THE CANADIAN PRESS

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Many Canadian conservatives speak of Edmund Burke as they would their first love. Their tributes are fond and wistful.

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From Reagan-esque paeans to talk of common sense and gradual change, our intellectual and political right still speaks like it lives in a cohesive, recognizable country that treasures inherited norms and trusted institutions.

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In practice, Burkean conservatism in Canada is mostly an illusion and an aspiration, not a serious program. The Canada that Burkeans describe, in which institutions broadly respect the past, simply does not exist.

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Howard Anglin has argued that liberalism “dissolved most of the familiar pre-liberal bonds of stigma and prejudice that had bound society together below the level of the state, it left our social order hanging by a few thin procedural threads.” In short, Liberalism has “swallowed its tail.”

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Activist courts have enthusiastically expanded their own powers with the lever granted them by the Charter, all in the name of “social justice” and special pleading. The basics of a society of ordered liberty have been bent to the will of progressive goals.

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The regime around it has followed suit, as ever-expanding, invented rights demand a greater bureaucracy to enforce them. Canada’s federal public service has grown by nearly 40 per cent since 2015, now costing about $71 billion annually, with nine federal employees per 1,000 residents, far more than comparable countries. Roughly one quarter of Canadians now work for the state.

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The bureaucracy has been gifted its own galaxy. It is the home of a managerial, bureaucratic army that claims to improve the population while treating its national story as something to be dismantled.

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The state is one of the most powerful architects of culture, if not the most powerful. It decides what traditions are “heritage” or “contraband.” The power to make those decisions is coveted by the left, and it has captured schools, accreditation bodies, grant councils and cultural institutions.

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Look at how Library and Archives Canada quietly deleted material about Sir John A. Macdonald from its website, diminishing his essential position in our history, or how many major museums now seem to specialize in “settler” humiliation. Since 2021, historic, beloved churches across Canada have been attacked by arsonists, many have burned to the ground. There has been no national reckoning, and no sense that an attack on churches may be an attack on the country itself.

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The terrain for this malaise was laid by men like former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who replaced a bicultural Dominion with an order of malleable, modern values. To exist, it depended on the older Canada for the unwritten customs and traditions that bind a people.